Scrubbing TIAA’s fossil fuels off our hands: The decision to divest
The children in my life, and yours, are aware that they’re growing up in a time of escalating climate change. Since just the past few years, climate has become a topic everywhere — in the media, in the classroom, in family conversations. Our children are curious, sometimes indignant, sometimes fired up to act. They worry about animals and trees and the ocean. If they’re lucky enough to be safe themselves, they probably know that other children are suffering in poorer communities and countries.
And somewhere within them there is, or there will be one day, the bitter awareness that their own future has been sacrificed.
That awareness is agonizingly present for me. Being with my grandchildren is pure joy, but it is shadowed by my dread for what they, and all today’s children, will face in twenty, thirty, forty years. The scientists’ warnings are ever more dire. The climate is already collapsing. The window of opportunity to avoid the worst of possible futures is rapidly closing, while legislators and the fossil fuel industry refuse to take effective action, or any action at all.
Their failure bewilders me. Greed, yes, but don’t they have children and grandchildren? Don’t they care what their lives will be?
Like so many of us who are neither legislators nor corporate leaders, I take what small steps I can take in my own life: minimizing carbon output, getting involved in local environmental actions, calling lawmakers. And making sure that my hard-earned cash is not making things worse.
We knew that TIAA is a financial giant that invests in fossil fuels, including coal, the worst driver of climate change.
In our middle age, after decades of economic struggle in the nonprofit realm, my husband and I were able to start saving some money. Eventually we found advisers to help with financial planning. We told them that our money had to support our values. We wanted only socially responsible investments.
A couple of years ago we saw that one of those investments was in a TIAA-CREF bond fund. I’m someone whose eyes glaze over at the sight of a spreadsheet, but this got my attention. We knew that TIAA is a financial giant that invests in fossil fuels, including coal, the worst driver of climate change. We asked our adviser about it. He reassured us that this bond fund was classified as environmental, social, and governance investing (ESG).
But as we learned more about TIAA’s enormous scale and its toxic relationship with the very industries that are actively ruining our world, we looked more carefully. And we saw climate destruction embedded right there in the fund. For example, Dominion Energy is trying to build out two new fracked-gas pipelines through the Blue Ridge and Appalachian regions of Virginia and West Virginia. Then there’s KEPCO with its massive coal expansion, Duke Energy, guilty of huge fracked gas expansion, and BNP Paribas, currently being sued by European climate campaigners over its aggressive new oil and gas expansion. And more.
From fueling toxic fracking to polluting Black majority neighborhoods, destroying people’s land, and leaking methane (a worse greenhouse gas than CO2) from pipelines, TIAA’s partners are harming communities and climate.
TIAA (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association) manages pension accounts for 1500 institutions, serving 5 million individual clients, particularly university professors and staff, researchers, health professionals and nonprofit workers — many of whom care a lot about climate change. Its overall holdings are $1.3 trillion. Of this, $78 billion is invested in fossil fuels, $9 billion of which are coal industry bonds. As Bill McKibben said in The Harvard Crimson, TIAA is “heavily invested in climate destruction,” including the Adani coalmines in India and Australia.
When local residents protesting a new fracked gas power plant in New York’s Hudson Valley realized that TIAA was a major investor in the plant, they formed the organization TIAA-DIVEST. TIAA-DIVEST works with educational institutions to pass resolutions demanding that TIAA divest from fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure, deforestation, and land grabs. So far they’ve convinced 17 higher education institutions to do so, including Cornell University and the American Federation of Teachers.
It began to feel awful, and wrong, to know that our own money was aiding fossil fuel companies to ruin the world.
I’m not a university teacher and nor is my husband. We were modest individual investors, not pension-holders. But it began to feel awful, and wrong, to know that our own money, so painstakingly earned and saved, was aiding fossil fuel companies not only to ruin the world that all our descendants will inherit, but to create enormous harm to the environment and to human beings in the here-and-now.
So we decided to divest from TIAA. We told our adviser about our concerns. We asked him to sell our holdings and to find instead a financially sound bond fund that was genuinely committed to a cleaner and safer world for all living beings.
I admit it was unnerving to make this decision. We are not financial experts, and as we grow older we depend on this money. Our adviser is committed to our well-being and we’re used to following his suggestions. We didn’t want to be idiots. But there are financially sound alternatives to a planet-fouling behemoth like TIAA.
My fears for our grandchildren’s lives will not be assuaged until the fossil fuel industry is forced to change course. Meanwhile we contribute to the climate crisis ourselves simply by living here in the US. But now we know that at least in this one respect we are not complicit in destruction.
We’ve told TIAA and its asset manager Nuveen about our divestment. We don’t expect to hear back from them. Our former holdings count for less than a micro-drop in the oil barrel as far as they’re concerned.
But we’re far from alone. For others whose connection to TIAA is a moral burden, as it was for us: you can learn more about it, join the TIAA-Divest campaign, and even divest individually.
With enough pressure TIAA will have to conclude that it’s no longer profitable to invest in dirty fuels, dealing a seismic blow to the fossil fuel industry. They can’t commit their crimes without our money.
